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Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (H?o Lóngb?n / ???) said on Sunday that Taipei will not switch from Hanyu Pinyin to Tongyong Pinyin, despite pressure from the Ministry of the Interior to do so.

Questioned by reporters at the wedding of Taiwan’s top “Go” player, Hau stressed that the Taipei City Government would continue to use Hanyu Pinyin despite the Interior Ministry’s push as it’s the most commonly used pinyin system in the international community.

“Taipei City has decided to continue using Hanyu Pinyin to connect with other countries in the world,” Hau said.

He suggested that the Interior Ministry consult with linguistic scholars and learn to respect their expertise when standardizing the romanization of Taiwan’s place and street names.

Heh, it was dead when it was launched, but the signs are still up. Can’t remember which road I was on recently when I noticed that there was no “English” (i.e. Pinyin) name besides the “nicknumber’. Now that’s going to be very annoying if you can’t read the Chinese characters.

Unfortunately not. It just goes in and out of various states of dormancy. For example, years after the nicknumbering system was introduced — i.e., what should have been enough time for even politicians to have figured out it was a stupid idea — the Taipei City Government started putting up new address plates on buildings. In general, this is a good thing, because the new address plates are larger than the old ones (which could be hard to read from the street, especially on major streets where the sidewalks are wider) and because they have romanization in addition to Hanzi.

Or at least some of them have romanization. Most of the newish signs on buildings on major roads have the nicknumbering system and no romanization. To make things worse, these signs have no mention (outside of Chinese characters) of sections (duan) or even of east/west, north/south. Thus, for example, “8 4th Blvd” could describe no fewer than nine different addresses (No. 8 Zhongxiao West Road Sec. 2, No. 8 Zhongxiao West Road Sec. 1, No. 8 Zhongxiao East Road Sec. 1, No. 8 Zhongxiao East Road Sec. 2, etc.). For an example of how nicknumbering has crept into areas beyond just street signs, zoom in on Microsoft’s Live Search map of Taipei; note how most major roads are identified by nicknumbers only — no names.

All we gots to do is attend the http://www.tiwa.org.tw/ rally on 2007
Dec 09, where at least I will carry banner “?????”, and after we
get our ID cards, we then get appointed to the future International
Embarrassment Reduction Committee with power to fix the mess…